What will Facebook do with virtual reality?

Technology couldn't back up the bold concept of virtual reality in the 80s,
but 30 years of advances have made it truly viable. The question is, what
will Facebook do with the Oculus and its Rift headset now that it's paid
$2bn for it?

Virtual reality struck the minds of engineers at the Airbus factory in Toulouse, France. Given the extreme stress some passengers experience during a flight, they decided to buy ownership for a helmet that would use 3D images and holograms to transport them to another, much calmer world, away from the noises and sights of the plane itself.

In the 80s, when the term virtual reality was coined, headsets were huge, clunky things whose weight would never allow you to forget the existence of the real world, even if their rudimentary, blocky graphics of the virtual world were convincing. Which they weren’t.

The technology just wasn’t ready, never managed to shake off its Lawnmower Man image and eventually faded away. Until Oculus.

The technology had been accelerating and miniaturising, and few people had realised that it was now ready for another try at VR. In 2011 a 19-year-old Californian student, Palmer Luckey, had the foresight and talent to cobble together a device that would eventually capture the imagination of the thousands of investors who poured $2.4 million into a Kickstarter campaign to polish the product for release.

The Rift headset still hadn’t been launched commercially, but had already attracted a host of developers keen to release titles for it. Small, light and able to draw on more powerful computers than those available in the 80s, the Rift garnered rave reviews.

He had been one of the earliest and largest investors in Oculus, putting five figures into the Kickstarter campaign. He had also been developing a Minecraft version for the virtual reality headset. A project which has now been shelved.

“Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven’t historically been a stable platform. There’s nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me," he said.

"Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build."

Any other developers with concerns have plenty of other options, as a host of competing start-ups are waiting in the wings. Even huge players like Sony are getting in on the act, with the recently-announcedProject Morpheus headset for the Playstation 4.

Aside from these worries, it’s not clear what Facebook hope to achieve with the purchase. Mark Zuckerberg says that the company is ready to focus on “what platforms come next” after years spent focusing on how to squeeze money from mobile users and described his vision in a blog post.

"Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face - just by putting on goggles in your home," he said.

But, frankly, I have imagined it, and it doesn’t appeal: HD television coverage seems a better way to enjoy sports, the fantastic Khan Academy videos show that the best way to learn complex subjects can sometimes be to remove visual distractions, not add them, and remote healthcare seems a long way away.

If Facebook’s vision is to apply it to social networks and have users sitting in a virtual room, chatting to virtual avatars, I’ll stick with text messages.